The residents of the Neslolo Valley, in neighborhoods strung on the meandering river like beads on a snarled string, were alternately clustered together on benches of usable land and distanced from one another by passages of rapids and rifles. The fifty-three acres that were left of the original Kramer homestead were alone on the north bank of Kramer’s Bend, a stretch of deep water that lazed westerly in a nearly hundred and eighty degree arc from the riffle beneath the Hinsvaark Bridge to a twisting, north-northwesterly slide of whitewater, along which no one could live until the now-deserted Armbrister place. Neither could anyone live in the patchwork of Crown Corporation forest and clearcut directly across from the Kramers on the north side of Long Andrew Ridge.
There were two homesteads on the flat bench of the upriver shoulder of Kramer’s Bend: Jensen’s, currently being rented by a gang of Mexican treeplanters, and Old Frick’s. The raucous music the Mexicans played during their Saturday all-day parties sometimes sounded like it was right outside the Kramers’ kitchen window, while at other times it either seemed to be coming from the Armbrister place, in completely the wrong direction, or else was not heard at all unless the Kramers came out their front door and walked up to the Hinsvaark Bridge, where it was like the Spanish-language MTV they could get on the satellite dish but turned all the way up to ten. The Frick place was actually closer than Jensen’s, but seldom was anything at all heard from that quarter. When Kramer as a kid had cut hay for Young Frick, his mother had been able to call him home to supper with a just-barely-raised voice as she stood on their back porch, yet he could shout and shout his return to her and not be heard.
Old Frick’s, as they still called it, was located in a natural cul-de-sac which Old Frick and then Young Frick had knocked themselves out farming or ranching or whatever they could do to make a buck, and which a succession of renters had also failed to turn into anything. The last renters at Old Frick’s had installed professional-looking chain-link kennels for raising Afghan hounds. Now these new people kept wolves.
It was the new renters at Old Frick’s, in fact, who were the object of Gowen’s current preoccupation. Watching the wolves pace back and forth in the Afghan hound kennel and listening to them being harassed by the neighborhood coyotes night after night, the Kramer brothers had at first found themselves in an unusual state of agreement. Neither of them would have admitted to any romantic notions about the forest that surrounded them or the creatures therein, which as a matter of fact had not included any freeranging wolves for at least a generation, but the penning up of such creatures was, in Gowen’s word, “weird.” The brothers had assumed that the new neighbors were the source of the flyers taped to the Vildefeld store window advertising WOLF AND WOLF-X PUPPIES FOR SALE, but then Gowen, Mr. Town Gossip, learned that the wolf-puppy seller was someone else entirely. The new neighbors weren’t selling, just keeping, which was even weirder.
Beyond which Kramer was unwilling to listen. He had been down this road with Gowen too many times. He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose.
“You don’t know whose dog that is, Gowen. The only way we know for certain where those goddamn wolves are is we can see ’em in the binocs. Jesus Christ.”
“If it ain’t Wes’s dog, then whose dog is it?”
“Oh ja,” Kramer said, imitating the great-grandfather he had known but Gowen had not. He zipped up and turned away.
Suddenly from the bottom of the yard their own dog, Bucket, started up. They both shushed him immediately. This was how it started every evening now. First one dog, then another, then the coyotes, and then the goddamn wolves.
“I’m going to bed now, Gow.”
“I got the information on ’em,” Gowen said again.
A single coyote sent a long wail out from some hillside — they could not have said which — and was answered from somewhere lower down, closer, possibly on their side of the river. Quickly more coyotes chimed in, followed by Bucket, unable finally to restrain himself. They let him go. Soon Bucket and the other dog dropped out, so that it was only pure coyote singing. The song rose to fill the entire bowl of the valley, transforming itself, as they listened, to a kind of wild laughter. Kramer was just opening the back door when the wolves joined in. Half in, half out of the doorway, he paused for that interval, now familiar, of uncertain duration but predictable conclusion, in which at some undetectable-to-human-ears cue the coyotes stopped suddenly, all together on a single beat, leaving the wolves to continue solo, forlorn, and ridiculous in their cages.
“Same coyote practical joke, night after night,” Kramer said. “Why do you think they do that?”
“I know for a fact the wolf guy’s running a meth lab up there, right up there by Old Frick’s Spring, right there by that big maple, remember? Remember that big maple? Thirty-five-foot trailer. Can’t see it, but it’s there. Fishburn or Fishback or Fishman, some goddamn thing like that, something with fish in it. Keeps a few cows so he can pretend he’s doing something over there, and the wolves so people’ll think he’s real bad. Lives with some kind of child prostitute or sex abuse victim or something.”
It was Kramer, not Gowen the ladies’ man, who saw the Fisher woman first. He wouldn’t have said she was a woman really but a girl, and with her short hair Kramer thought at first she was a boy, fourteen or so, soaked to the skin and white with chill, drying off in front of Wes Greenly’s stove. But then she had looked back at him and arched her spine to the heat.
It automatically put Kramer one up, and the first half-thought that went through his head was, wait till I tell Gowen.
Lately, with the national forests closing up because of the spotted owl and all the environmental laws, and sawmills shutting down all over the country, the valley was full of women and children who had been deserted by their men. The Kramer family had the opposite problem: three generations of women had run off. Kramer alone, having never actually had a woman, had avoided this rite of passage. Gowen had been married, if only briefly, ten years before and had subsequently had a string of girlfriends, but since the wife he hadn’t brought any of his women home and Kramer didn’t know any of them, although he might know their fathers or their brothers or their estranged spouses.
Kramer didn’t really know any single women, at least none that he thought of as such. He had missed out on the few schoolgirls of his youth, eight total in the sophomore class he had dropped out of at age sixteen to go to work in the woods, and as the years had gone by, there had been only a few widows or castoffs with children who had caught his eye. But he’d had enough of child-rearing with raising Gowen from age three, himself barely more than a child at the time.